"...isn't it a fallacy to believe that an individual life only has meaning for itself? Just as an individual death makes little sense when isolated from the lives of others."

Love, isolation, natural beauty, and a suicide epidemic are all part of life in in a remote town in Greenland. How are eleven suicides in one night related to one another and to the larger society? While the deaths all take place in one village of 1,500 people, through flashbacks we see the larger picture of the Greenlanders connections (and dis-connections) with each other, with the village, and with Denmark.

Kim's words reveal the geographical landscape and also the internal landscape of the individuals. The village is "a place that swallows you up." For Sara suicide "... was a kind of shield of protection, the layer between her own skin and the skin of the world, one that would keep everything away from her." ( )

In 2008 fifteen young adults tried to kill themselves within five hours in a small city in Greenland. Anna Kim travelled to Greenland and talked to the population, because she wanted to find out about the reasons and motives behind the high suicide rate there. Anatomie einer Nacht is the result of her research: A drama in five acts, but without climax, only with a penetrating monotony. Kim tells us the story of a mortal epidemic where eleven inhabitants kill themselves within five hours. The relations between the people are partly stronger, partly weaker – sometimes a glance is just enough to get “infected”.

Anatomie einer Nacht is not an easy read.

First, because of the topic and the very depressing atmosphere of the book: Kim describes a loneliness which is heart-breaking. The nature in on Greenland is wasteland and so overwhelming that people are losing themselves in it - their bodies and souls merge with the surrounding. (One of my thoughts was that if I wouldn’t have known that it takes place in Greenland, if the country wouldn’t have been named directly, it could have been a landscape in a dystopian novel.) Because of the Danish colonisation they lost their identity and never won it back. Their lives up to now where sad and brutal and the future won’t bring any change.

Second, Kim’s narrating style requires getting used to. There’s no chronological order and she jumps back and forth in time. There are so many different protagonists, but they are not characterised strongly, so it’s hard to remember them and their links to other characters. Until the moment when you realize that all these details about who-what-when-where are not so important, it’s a very annoying reading experience. Kim also wants too much: She presses so many topics apart from suicide into these 300 pages - it’s overwhelming. Personally I liked e.g. the reflection of the connection between day/night – visibility/invisibility – mortality/immortality which is a main thought throughout the novel. But Kim wears it out and until the ending it palls.

My feelings about the book are still very mixed: It is not a bad book, but I don’t really like it. As a consequence rating and recommending it is very difficult – I dare you trying it yourself! ( )